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“... There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian background, but their poetry isn’t usually interested in doing so – not at its most characteristic and not to an extent that would make the term ‘working-class poet’ a useful one ...”

“... about the plot of Sappho’s ‘jealousy’ poem, the language, of Io’s transformation in Aeschylus, Cicero’s Pro Caelio in the tradition of invective. The ensemble traces patterns and parallels. Women need sex: ancient doctors and modern therapists alike attribute all their illnesses to frustration. Women must marry: modern fiction follows ancient ...”

“... a little lower down, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, along with the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and (less congenial to modern taste) those bombastic orators Lysias and Demosthenes. What’s more, as Menippus’ answer to Apollonius shows, judgments of literary quality were always related to judgments about the social ...”

“... the Furies, those terrifying Erinyes optimistically renamed ‘the kindly ones’ at the end of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. (John Lyly had also bestowed it on a questing knight in his comedy Endimion a few years before Peele.) Like Shakespeare’s notorious sea-coast of Bohemia, Catita cannot be found on any map, nor can a winged Jackanapes improbably flying ...”

“... Crowd, expresses the thought that ‘what the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus imagined our nursery children feel’ – that is, ‘the defects of natural laws’. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy declares that Michael Henchard has been brought down by ‘the ingenious machinery contrived by the gods for reducing human ...”

“... have printed them nor probably have continued to write verse, but would have devoted himself to Aeschylus and Greek negatives and the possible derivation of Attic culture through the Phoenicians from Egypt – activities which he rather touchingly took up again during his last years as a Classics professor in Dublin. All his life Hopkins was haunted by the ...”

“... the present day. Commentaries preserve traces of what has been lost, including the satyr-plays of Aeschylus and other dramatists (Euripides’ Cyclops is the only surviving example of this genre), Aristotle’s annotated lists of play performances at Athens and an enormous quantity of lyric poetry. Of course, we cannot know the extent of the loss without ...”

“... in historical record but in art, and he is repeatedly scornful of Greek dramatists, especially Aeschylus, whose death from a dropped tortoise he finds highly comic. The most extreme instance of textual reinterpretation, and the most relevant to the novel, comes in the work of Pigres, a poet who claims to be ‘Homer born again’ and who rewrites the Iliad ...”

“... of the surviving plays by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, and one by Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, trace the tortured history of the clan, for whose sins the city suffered plague, civil war and dictatorship. Through these dramas, Antigone especially, an idea of Thebes as a site of sin and suffering has endured.Cadmus, a ...”

“... to the greatest of English anti-novels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Later in life he read Aeschylus once a year, loved to declaim poetry to his friends and family in several languages and held a Shakespeare reading group in his London home. He also founded a workers’ circle in Brussels which had regular sessions on music and literature. His daughter ...”

“... where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which lie in heaps around is awful.’ Only a fortnight earlier he had told his mother: ‘do not worry about me. I am very happy; it is a great experience, psychologically so ...”

“... Ceausescus on television (‘they’ve given us, unrehearsed, a scene worthy of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Journeying together towards eternity, simple and majestic, Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu have joined the immortal lovers of world history’), Carrère tries to soften the effect of a fascist panegyric by suggesting that Limonov had been ...”

“... had no real knowledge of what happened, any more than they did in the matter of Homer. But both Aeschylus and Euripides suggest that an earlier shrine in Delphi belonged, appropriately enough, to Gaia (Earth), and it’s confirmed by the archaeological record, which Scott, again rightly, says is what we should rely on, though he perhaps doesn’t draw all ...”

“... him. But he was the first to do so under the influence of the ancient history of drama from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, not to mention the more recent history of German idealist philosophy, from Kant to Hegel, Schelling, Feuerbach and – a little later – Schopenhauer. Wagner not only wrote more books than any other major composer, he must certainly ...”

“... the real queen remained safely in hiding.’ Hints of the story of the phantom Helen are given in Aeschylus and Herodotus, and it is told explicitly in Plato’s account of Stesichorus’ recantation. Stesichorus was forced to repent his unjust description of Helen: she never went to Troy, he claims, it was her phantom that was fought over. Paris was a ...”